Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you.

I'd always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren't famous.

I read more than I do anything else, probably. I read about three books a week.

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

It's very hard for me to get a new car. It's really hard for me to get a new house. It's really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability.

Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me.

I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.

I'd like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young.

The movies I made when I was 14 or 15, I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.

My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant.

I'm kind of a chatterbox and I talk really fast.

I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.

I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.

I am the luckiest filmmaker I know.

By the first week of shooting, you know exactly where your film is heading based on the psychology of your director.

But now I really don't want to work unless I really, really care about a project.

You develop a third eye where you kind of know where they are in a room at all times but no matter how vigilant you are as a parent, at some point, you'll look around a room and can't find them and there's a searing pain that goes through your body.

People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.

My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I'm always on time - or early.

In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.